Athirasam

Athirasam

Athi rasam : What a perfect name for this sweet. Oh so delicious and yummy. I was talking to my friend the other day and as she put it aptly - I can eat it "anytime", "anywhere" and  "in any form"!

Athirasam is made with a mixture of raw rice flour and jaggery. Once the rice flour mixture is prepared with jaggery, it has to be kept for 3 days at room temperature for all the goodness of jaggery to be infused into the rice flour. I remember those good old childhood days when my mom used to make the athirasam mix(athirasam maavu) and keep it tightly covered with a cloth. To safeguard from us, she used to keep it in the top most shelf.But we used to get around and find ways to stack up chairs to take that yummy maavu and eat just like that .

Ingredients:
Raw rice - 1 cup
Powdered Jaggery - 3/4 cup
cardamom powder - 1 pinch
Oil - For frying

Preparation:

•  Wash the raw rice and soak it in water for 2 hours.
• Drain the water out completely and dry the rice in a paper towel or a clean kitchen towel for 30 minutes.
• After 30 minutes, powder the rice using the food processor or mixer.
• Sieve the rice powder and press it a little with a towel and keep it covered with the towel. The moisture should not be lost from the rice powder.

• Melt the jaggery with a 1/4 cup water and filter it.
• After filtering, keep the jaggery again in the stove in medium heat.
• Keep stirring it and let it boil till it changes to soft ball consistency.

• To check for the consistency, take a little of the syrup in a spoon and put it in a shallow bowl of water. It will settle in the bottom.If you collect the settled jaggery and roll it, you should be able to roll it into a soft ball.
• Once it reaches the soft ball consistency, put off the flame and add the hot jaggery to the rice flour, add the cardamom powder and start mixing it with the spoon.Once you mix all the flour and jaggery, keep it at room temperature for 2 days.

• After two days, it would have risen a little bit and would be little stiff. Roll them into small balls and keep the ball on top of a ziploc cover and flatten it till it becomes flat and thick.
• Remove it from the cover and fry it in oil till golden brown in color.

• Make sure to keep the oil in low flame when you fry it.Else it will not cook inside properly.
• Enjoy the delicious athirasams. It can be stored in an airtight container for few days.

Note: I had added a tablespoon of white sesame seeds.But it is totally optional.